Friday, May 22, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 20. Please note: this was published before Bill English delivered his Budget speech.)

Conventional wisdom has it that New Zealand is doing well
economically, at least by international standards.

Calling us the rock star economy, as one over-excited bank
economist did in January last year, might be overdoing things a bit. But we
certainly came through the global financial crisis relatively unscathed
compared with most northern hemisphere countries.

Share market investors have enjoyed a couple of very good
years, although the gains don’t seem to have trickled down to wage earners
(funny, that). We’re even enjoying the rare pleasure of getting the jump on
Australia, where the mining boom has run out of puff and the economy is
contracting.

The economy is frequently cited as the main reason National
won a third term. Economic growth is strong and Finance Minister Bill English
is seen as a prudent manager who has kept things stable during a period of
international turbulence, even if he has failed to deliver the surplus National
kept promising.

(Why National placed so much emphasis on achieving that
surplus, when it looked shaky from the outset and was never likely to be more
than paper-thin anyway, is a mystery – but politics, like economics, isn’t
always easy to understand.)

You can be sure that English will use his Budget speech
tomorrow to tell a positive story, despite having no
surplus to boast about. That’s what governments do on Budget Day. Between
elections it’s arguably the most important event in politics: an opportunity
for governments to set goals and put the best possible gloss on their
achievements.

But whatever English might say tomorrow, and no matter how
enthusiastically his colleagues might applaud him, I can’t help worrying that
the New Zealand economy is highly vulnerable.

I suspect I’m not entirely alone in this. Reserve Bank
governor Graeme Wheeler, a man not given to making extravagant statements, talked
only last week about the threat posed to the banking system by the
stratospheric rise in Auckland property values.

Wheeler said the risk of a sharp fall in Auckland house
prices causing a “significant” rise in bank loan losses had increased in the
past six months.

His words were typically restrained. But when someone like
Wheeler talks about the stability of the financial system being at risk, we
should sit up and listen.

There are parallels here with the conditions that triggered
the global financial crisis in the United States. There, people ill able to
afford mortgage payments were encouraged to borrow heavily to invest in houses.

When property values collapsed, those purchasers were left
“underwater” – burdened with homes that were no longer worth the money they had
borrowed to buy them, and unable to service their mortgages.

In simple terms, banks couldn’t recover their money. The
resulting crisis destabilised the entire international banking system. It was a
central cause of the global recession whose effects are still being felt.

It would be a cruel irony if, having escaped the worst
effects of the global financial crisis, New Zealand now experienced a similar
financial shock, albeit on a far smaller scale, because of the overheated Auckland
housing market. But that seemed to be what Wheeler was suggesting.

It wouldn’t be the first time. In fact it happened as recently
as 1989 when the taxpayer had to bail out the BNZ, which had succumbed to the
euphoria of financial deregulation and pressed money on everyone who showed up
at the door.

But the Auckland housing boom isn’t the only risk – in fact
may not even be the biggest risk – to our “rock star” economy.

The elephant in the room is the dairy industry. Wheeler
mentioned this, too, pointing out that many dairy farmers are heavily indebted
and facing negative cash flow because of the slump in dairy prices.

The average farmer is milking 100 more cows than six years
ago but making no more money, according to a speaker at a recent conference.

Our international competitiveness has been severely eroded. More
forced sales of dairy farms can be expected – another serious issue for the
banking sector.

Who saw this coming? Certainly not the farmers and investors
who borrowed huge sums assuming the dairying bonanza would continue to deliver fat
profits. And probably not the government either, which seemed happy for New
Zealand to become heavily dependent on one industry as long as it delivered
economic growth.

What makes matters worse is that vast tracts of land have
been converted to dairying from other uses for which the land was better
suited. The environmental cost, which is borne by all of us, has been enormous.

The possibility that after all that, the perceived economic
benefits of the dairying boom may have been largely illusory is too dismal to
contemplate.

Oh, and did I mention that if the banks take a big hit
because they’re over-exposed to the dairying sector, the rest of will
inevitably suffer too, one way or another?

Saturday, May 16, 2015

TVNZ’s Sunday
programme this week included an item about student partying in Dunedin. Residents
unlucky enough to have noisy, drunk, inconsiderate students as neighbours have
had a gutsful, and who can blame them?

The programme included footage taken in a student flat
famous for its parties. An occupant proudly showed the reporter his rubbish-strewn
bedroom, still trashed after the most recent revelry.

To say it wasn’t fit for a dog would be an understatement. No
self-respecting rat would have tolerated the mess and filth.

Other footage included scenes of the annual Hyde St party
that marks the start of the academic year. At this year’s event a St John’s
Ambulance vehicle was attacked, a dozen party-goers were arrested and many more
needed medical attention.

An anthropologist studying the footage might reasonably
conclude that human evolution has peaked and that we’re now on our way back to
being grunting cave-dwellers.

I understand the programme is likely to be the subject of
complaints that it didn’t fairly reflect the behaviour of the whole Dunedin
student population.

That may be so. Certainly, Sunday did little to dispel the view that many students are
pampered, narcissistic slobs. It seems a very long time since student culture
was defined by political passion and cutting satirical wit.

What struck me most, however, was the readiness to place the
blame for the oafishness not on the students, where it belonged, but on booze.
“It’s absolutely the alcohol,” said one of the aggrieved neighbours.

Otago University’s vice-chancellor, Harlene Hayne, also seized
on alcohol as the culprit. If student behaviour was going to be changed, she
said, New Zealand had to get serious about making alcohol harder to obtain.

Professor Hayne appears not to have a very high opinion of
her students. She seems to regard them as powerless to control their behaviour
under the mystical influence of drink.

But of course alcohol makes a convenient scapegoat for the
university’s embarrassment at the bad publicity brought on it by all the unruly
partying.

Don’t blame our students, Hayne seemed to be saying; blame
the wicked liquor barons who force them to drink too much and then behave like
oiks. And blame the politicians who refuse to tighten the liquor laws (no doubt
because they’re in thrall to the booze merchants).

What Hayne and the disgruntled neighbour of the student
revellers appear to overlook is that hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders
drink alcohol regularly (I do it every day) without behaving badly.

Drunken idiocy is not an inevitable consequence of liquor
consumption. People don’t have to trash houses, urinate in the street, vomit in
the neighbour’s garden or start fights. It’s their choice to do so.

The problem, then, is not alcohol; it’s us. This is a point
made persuasively by the British anthropologist Anne Fox in a recent study of
public drunkenness in New Zealand and Australia.

Critics will question the credibility of Fox’s research
because it was commissioned by the liquor conglomerate Lion, but much of what
she says is inarguable.

She says we accept a level of drunkenness that would not be accepted
in many other Western countries. But she also points out that even in societies
where there is high liquor consumption, it’s not associated with anti-social
behaviour as it is here.

Fox argues that we accept drunkenness as an excuse for
behaviour that would not otherwise be tolerated, and that scapegoating alcohol
as the sole cause of bad behaviour merely diverts attention from “maladaptive
cultural norms”. (I think that’s a polite way of saying we’re an immature lot,
and who can disagree?)

Let me be clear: I detest boorish drunken behaviour. But no
one is forced to get drunk, and still less to behave like a moron (or turn
violent, which of course is far worse) if they do.

Dunedin mayor Dave Cull had it right on Sunday, even if the vice-chancellor of Otago University couldn’t
see it. Cull said there had been too much tolerance of bad behaviour.

As long as we exempt people from responsibility for offensive
behaviour when they’re drunk, we’ll make no headway against the drinking
culture that public health experts and sanctimonious academics profess to be so
concerned about.

But of course it's easier to blame the liquor industry. It also panders to popular prejudices (enthusiastically stoked by the same academics, some of them employed by Otago University) that we are all at the mercy of wicked, unscrupulous capitalists.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

At about ten past six last night I switched off my TV in disgust. Then I sent a text message to Mark Jennings, TV3's head of news and current affairs, telling him I wouldn't be watching 3 News again anytime soon. I doubt that he'll lose any sleep over that, but at least I felt marginally better for having registered a protest.

What I'd just seen on 3 News made me feel literally sick to the stomach. The network reported that Kaikohe police had arrested a 15-year-old girl for an assault that was captured on video and put online.

Journalist Karen Rutherford's report on the incident included the video footage. It was hard to watch, as only real-life violence can be - the more so when the perpetrator is a teenage girl.

The assault was shocking in its savagery and intensity. The victim, a girl of similar age, was reportedly ambushed as she got off a bus. She attempted to defend herself but was overwhelmed by the sheer fury of the attack, which involved knees to the face and head as well as a hail of punches. The assailant looked as if she had done this sort of thing before.

That a 15-year-old girl should be capable of such sustained and clearly premeditated violence was only one of several reasons to be shocked. Another was that someone, probably an associate of the attacker, captured it on video and put it online for others to enjoy. A third was that bystanders stood around and did nothing.

But this simply tells us there are feral people out there who indulge in behaviour (presumably learned from, if not encouraged by, their elders) that most of us find reprehensible. We knew that anyway.

What was inexcusable was that 3 News magnified and compounded the outrage by screening the footage - and not just briefly, which would have been all that was necessary to convey what had happened, but at length. And repeatedly.

I replayed the item this morning. Rutherford's item ran for more than two minutes, during which there were six video segments - that's right, six - showing the attack. The longest ran for about 13 seconds and cumulatively the footage ran for nearly a minute.

It was stomach-churning, and what made it all the more repulsive was that the incident was reported with the hypocritical tone of moral disapproval at which television journalists excel.

We were told that the Kaikohe police were disgusted that someone had filmed the assault, and an academic interviewed by Rutherford suggested that the person who did the filming was no better than the perpetrator of the attack.

Amen to that. But where does that leave 3 News, which obviously liked the footage so much that it showed parts of the attack two or three times? A few seconds would have been sufficient to show us how ugly it was, but the footage was gratuitously replayed over and over, even as Rutherford was telling viewers in tut-tutting tones how despicable it was.

If the person who shot and uploaded the footage was morally complicit in the offence, then 3 News is too - in fact far more so, because 3 News took what would previously have been seen by only a very limited online audience and replayed it, at length, on national television.

I would feel complicit too if I continued to watch a news bulletin that demonstrated such an abysmal lack of ethical judgment, so I won't.

Drive east from Masterton toward the Wairarapa coast and you
come across a charming country village called Tinui. It was here that my wife
and I attended an Anzac Day service on the centenary of the Gallipoli landings.

The April 25 pilgrimage to Tinui has become an annual ritual
for us, not because of any deep personal connection, but because in many ways it’s
the quintessential Anzac Day experience.

It also has historical significance. The Rev Basil Ashcroft
held a service in Tinui’s pretty little Anglican church (still in use) at
7.30am on August 25, 1916 in honour of seven young local men who had lost their
lives at Gallipoli. It’s claimed to have been the first-ever Anzac Day
commemoration.

So here we are in brilliant autumn sunshine, several hundred
of us – the crowd gets bigger every year – filling the road outside the Tinui hall.
Many others take up vantage points on a tree-shaded bank opposite.

A pipe band leads a small parade up the quiet country road
from where the Tinui pub, now downsized to a café, used to stand at the turnoff
to Castlepoint.

Local schoolchildren stand in front of the war memorial and recite
the names of the 48 men from the surrounding district who died in the two world
wars – 36 in World War I and 12 in the 1939-45 war.

Among those killed in the 1914-18 war were two lots of three
men with the same surnames, which gives some insight into the devastating impact
the war must have had on what was then an isolated farming community.

One of those named is Private J R (Jack) Dunn, who was
sentenced to be shot at Gallipoli for falling asleep on sentry duty. By modern
standards it seems unthinkable, but a different military ethos applied then. (To
its credit, Australia refused to let its soldiers be executed by the British,
but New Zealand deferred to its former colonial masters.)

Dunn was subsequently reprieved by British general Sir Ian
Hamilton but died anyway in the bloody assault on Chunuk Bair only three days
later. His body was never recovered.

Someone from the military always gives a speech at Tinui and
this year it’s retired sergeant major Bob Davies, a Vietnam veteran who rose to
become the New Zealand army’s top non-commissioned officer.

An imposing man of classic military bearing, Davies gives an
authoritative account of New Zealand’s involvement in foreign conflicts. It’s
not a political speech but in passing, he makes a significant point.

One of the reasons New Zealand had a disproportionately high
casualty rate in World War II, Davies says, was that the defence forces had
been run down after World War I and we were unprepared. I couldn’t help
wondering whether we’re in a similar predicament today.

We sing the national anthem in Maori and English and listen
to a Bible reading in which St Paul enjoined the Ephesians to put
on the full armour of God so that when the day of evil came, they would be able
to stand their ground.

“Stand firm then,” Paul wrote, “with the
belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness
in place,and with your feet fitted
with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.”

Paul has always struck me as a bit of a
prig, but he could string words together -- you have to give him that.

The stirring hymn How
Great Thou Art follows, after which we recite the time-honoured words from
Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen.
Then we’re introduced to a song that’s new to me. Called Honour the Dead, it’s sung to the tune of Abide with Me and includes a verse honouring conscientious
objectors – something that would have been inconceivable a generation ago.

I applaud the gesture of respect to the “conchies”, many of
whom were men of great moral courage, but the words – written by the prolific
New Zealand hymn writer Shirley Murray – are too hand-wringingly mawkish for my
taste.

The crowd watches in solemn silence as wreaths are laid.
Then the Last Post is played and right on cue, three vintage World War I
aircraft from Sir Peter Jackson’s collection at Hood Aerodrome in Masterton come
into view over a nearby hilltop and fly overhead.

All this is accompanied by the warbling of tuis in the trees
above the road. It’s lump-in-the-throat stuff, and all the more so because of
the idyllic setting. The men who left this peaceful valley in 1914 could have
had little idea of the bloody maelstrom awaiting them.

Afterwards everyone gathers in the hall for a superb Kiwi
morning tea (mince savouries, club sandwiches, asparagus rolls) prepared by the
local Women’s Institute. Those feeling energetic can then climb to the top of
nearby Mt Maunsell, where a small party led by the Rev Ashcroft installed an
Anzac memorial cross in 1916. A cross still stands there, on a rocky outcrop
high above the valley, though it’s not the original one.

They’re expecting a big crowd next year for Tinui’s 100th
Anzac Day service. Needless to say, I intend to be there.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Something was missing amid the outpouring of sentiment surrounding
the Gallipoli centenary.

Go back 30 years, and Anzac Day was often an occasion for
debate about the state of the armed forces.

The Returned Services Association was then still an
influential voice. Its leaders were men who had served in World War II. They
consistently sounded warnings about the dangers of running down our defence
capability.

My generation – the generation that marched against the
Vietnam War – dismissed them as crusty old reactionaries. But the veterans in
the RSA had personally experienced the consequences of being thrust into war
ill-prepared.

Defence spending had been greatly reduced after World War I,
the so-called war to end all wars. It’s now widely accepted among military
historians that our lack of preparedness was one reason why New Zealand forces
had such a high casualty rate – twice that of Australia – in World War II. So
how’s our preparedness today?

We got rid of our combat aircraft in the early 2000s. The
mainstays of our air force, the Orion and Hercules aircraft, date from the
1960s; they’re contemporaries of the Morris 1100.

Admittedly we have a relatively modern, if small, naval
fleet and the army has progressively upgraded its vehicles, although the
suitability of the replacements remains a subject of fierce debate.

But by world standards our defence spending is low: just 1
per cent of GDP, compared with Australia (1.6 per cent), Britain (2.2) and the
United States (3.8). All four countries have cut defence spending in recent
years, but New Zealand’s commitment has consistently been far weaker than that
of its friends.

Combat has become a disreputable word, as opposition to the
current Iraqi deployment shows.

As long as it’s safely distanced by history, as with
Gallipoli, war seems acceptable, even noble, but we prefer our modern defence
force to be cuddly and non-threatening. It exists chiefly to monitor truces, conduct
fisheries patrols and occasionally locate lost Tokelauan fishermen.

New Zealand defence personnel are internationally acclaimed
for the work they do, but no one should kid themselves that they’re capable of
defending us against attack. For that we would have to rely on our friends,
principally Australia and the United States.

How has this come about? For one thing, there has been a
generational change in politics. The baton passed from politicians with
first-hand experience of war – men like Jack Marshall and Robert Muldoon – to
the idealists of the protest generation.

The RSA has lost its clout as its numbers have thinned, so
there’s no one to harass the government on defence issues.

In any case, spending on defence has never been a vote
winner. It becomes important only when the country’s security is at risk.

It doesn’t help that defence equipment is eye-wateringly
expensive. A single Boeing Globemaster, one of the planes being touted as a
replacement for the venerable Hercules, costs $300 million.

The government spent $650 million buying 105 light armoured
vehicles in 2001 – a crazy decision – and only 11 have been deployed in combat
(in Afghanistan, where they proved unsuitable).

Politicians find it hard to justify that sort of expense, especially
when vociferous lobby groups are clamouring for more spending on health,
education and welfare.

But defence spending has been compared with buying an
insurance policy. It’s something you do even when you hope it won’t be
necessary. And if we expect other countries to help us in a crisis, they’re
surely entitled to expect that we’ll pull our weight proportionately.

A symbolic turning point was the Labour government’s
decision in 2001 to scrap the air force’s combat wing. Justifying that
decision, Helen Clark famously said that we lived in an “incredibly benign
strategic environment”.

Five months later, al-Qaeda launched its attacks on the United
States and the world was spectacularly destabilised overnight.

How does Clark’s assessment stack up today? The Middle East
is a seething cauldron. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is back to its aggressive Cold
War ways, flexing its muscles over the North Sea as well as in Ukraine.

Tension between China and a nationalistic, militarily
resurgent Japan has risen to dangerous levels and the North Korean despot Kim
Jong-un has nuclear missiles that he may just be mad enough to use.

Benign? Hardly. But Anzac Day has come and gone, and with it an opportunity for a useful discussion about defence. Clearly, we're more comfortable wallowing in sentiment over the conflicts of the past than with the troublesome realities of the here and now.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.